


a hard one to know

by brella



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-29
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-02-23 02:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2531387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Casey’s a tough nut to crack, in a nutshell. Ooh. Points for humor. Which would be great, like, if they weren’t about to die horribly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a hard one to know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mumblingmaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblingmaria/gifts).



> I totally forgot to ever cross-post this from Tumblr? Anyway, love u Maria.

Hunter is running.

Big news! Okay, maybe it’s more like scrambling, or sprinting, with a dash of flailing; why  _not_  start off the week with a borderline asthma attack and some possible external injuries, right? This is the life.

He takes a corner so sharply that he has to skid a little, arms circling wide to keep his balance, and his sneakers squeak on the linoleum when he rights himself and bounds forward again, hair flying back, cheeks flushed, yelping out apologies to whoever he almost mows down. He doesn’t even want to know what happens if you’re tardy for a class in this place. Do they lobotomize you? Stick screws under your thumbnails? Amputate your favorite toe? Liquify your brains? Waterboarding, whatever that actually is, he doesn’t know, does it involve surfing?

He is just in the middle of pondering the fathomless mystery of waterboarding when he smashes headlong into someone, earning a loud shriek and a flurry of cascading papers and a lot of startled gasps from assorted witnesses, and he goes flying, the other body rammed against him, and they both land in a heap on the floor, and his books spew from his open messenger bag, and oh, Mondays, your charm knows no bounds.

“OH, my  _God_ , I’m so sorry,” he splutters, fumbling to try to right himself and stop crushing whatever innocent bystander is currently pinned underneath him. “I’m so sorry, are you okay? Shit, shit, shit, shit—”

“Oh, it’s you, Hunter,” and that’s a voice he knows, and it sounds so fantastically underwhelmed, and the whole body under him goes slack in surrender, and he can somehow  _hear_  the eyes rolling. “Figures. Take your time.”

The sarcasm would sound scathing in any other context. He pushes himself up on his palms and flounders down at Casey, who scowls back up at him, hair spread out under her in an almost perfect circle, shirt wrinkled, mouth thin.

“Morning,” he greets her, grinning crookedly.

“Morning,” she retorts, and only Casey could  _retort_  a greeting, raising eyebrows briefly and pointedly like he’s a poorly trained dog, or something. People are whispering.

His mind catches up to him and he scrambles out of the way, falling on his side next to her, coolly trying to mask it by acting like he only did it to pick up her papers and his book. There’s something peculiarly familiar about all of this, but he can’t place it.

All of her papers are marked with red  _A+_ ’s. 

“Nice,” he comments, lifting one up.

She’s on one knee now, scooping papers toward her. She swipes it from him, frowning unamusedly, and he shrugs as innocently as he can, letting out a weak, “Heh.”

“Thanks for the approval, Hunter; it’s a beacon in this troubled time,” she deadpans, the words oozing sardonicism, and he fakes an offended look, cramming some of his own papers ( _C+_ ’s, all around) and textbooks haphazardly back into the messenger bag.

“You know what, it is, I’ll bet,” he declares with feigned injury.

Casey stands, brushes herself off, and offers him a hand. He grasps it, fingers closing tightly around her wrist, and she helps hoist him up, and he fights to ignore the way a warm sensation crawls contentedly up to his shoulder.

“Thanks,” he says as humbly as he can.

Casey flicks her eyes up and down over him. It’s been a few days since they’d busted Jade out of the nurse’s office; the weather has been sunny, nice for a picnic, and the light from outside streams in now from a high window above the lockers, deepening her hair with gold.

After a second, she lets out a sigh, bowing and shaking her head as if in concession, and when she lifts it back up again, she’s smiling wearily at him, one eyebrow raised. It’d be dumb to say his heart flutters, but it’d also be 100% the truth.

This is bad. Real bad. Bad as  _balls_.

“Come on, Speed Racer,” she teases him, steering him down the way he’d been heading. “I’ve got an hour free. I’ll walk you to class.”

It’s the best day of his life, for now.

 

*****

 

She’s freaking out. Or maybe she’s calm and collected, and it’s just a projection of his own severely freaked-out state. Casey’s a tough nut to crack, in a nutshell. Ooh. Points for humor. Which would be great, like, if they weren’t about to die horribly.

“We’re not going to die horribly,” Casey insists in an exasperated tone, eyes darting briefly upwards before returning to the padlock on the door. “We’re just—taking a detour.”

Hunter is so nerve-wracked, as it were, by the sound of approaching footsteps and shouting, that he starts bouncing rapidly on the balls of his feet, fidgeting, biting his lip, glancing from Casey to the hallway to Casey and back again, combing one hand through his hair.

“I think a key might help,” he hisses. “A key we don’t have, a key to a  _very big lock_  that is not pickable—”

Casey huffs and plucks a bobby pin out of her ponytail, and when Hunter stares protuberantly at her, she shrugs innocently.

“What?” She turns back to the lock, fiddling with it. “I grew up on a lot of  _Nancy Drew_.”

Maybe that’s a good thing.  _Nancy Drew_  conventions state that nobody ever actually dies or is in any mortal danger, but then again, Nancy Drew had that rich lawyer father and the tough boyfriend who could beat people up, and Nancy Drew never had to deal with time travel or any of that bullshit. Hunter doubts Nancy Drew would survive this place.

“They’re getting closer,” he grits out, kind of half-singing it in a strangled voice, for some reason. “If I’m gonna have to run at them and distract them, I’d prefer to know sooner rather than later.”

Casey snorts. “What would you do? Sing ‘Airborne Ranger?’”

“ _So_  not the time for that reference,” Hunter breathes, bouncing agitatedly some more and tugging on her sleeve. “Casey, _seriously_ —”

“Got it!” she exclaims, clapping him on the shoulder, face practically aglow. When she beams over at him, giving him a thumbs-up, some of her hair hangs in her face and her eyes pretty much sparkle and he forgets all about running away. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

“Uh-huh,” Hunter says, nodding dumbly, and Casey flings the door open and grabs him by the hood and they’re off.

“You know, we make a pretty good team,” he comments a while later, when they’re panting and wheezing outside their neighboring rooms, her clutching her chest and him doubled over with his hands on his knees.

She snorts, shooting him a wry look. “Sure. I do all the work and you stand there and whine.”

Hunter manages a shrug through the stitch in his side. “Well, uh, sure, we’re no Mulder and Scully, but…”

“Hunter, I’m kidding,” she tells him with a laugh, and when, astonished at the sound, he gapes up at her, she shakes her head, trying to tamper down the smile and failing. “Very brave, remember?”

“And very stupid,” he fills in, like an idiot.

Casey lightly punches his shoulder on her way to her door. “My favorite combination.”

 

*****

 

“This is a great song,” Hunter insists.

“This is Pharrell Williams,” Casey replies, like that settles something.

“Aw, come on,” Hunter says, grinning goofily, advancing with rhythmic steps on her as she sits at the desk and pointedly tries to ignore him. “Something tells me you aren’t feeling like a room without a roof.”

“No,” Casey retorts testily, dropping the arm propping up her chin and scowling at the wall. “I’m feeling like I need to get this homework done.”

Hunter claps his hands, spinning around on his heel and making at least  _some_  attempt at shaking his hips, but he probably fails massively, if the stifled snort Casey lets out is anything to go by. Whatever. Move to the groove. Music is life. Et cetera.

And maybe because he’s feeling brave, maybe because catchy songs make him say stupid things just the same way they make him move in stupid ways, he turns back toward her and says, “Dance with me.”

Casey laughs at that one. It is not an especially nice laugh.

“Um,” she practically  _sneers_ , pushing some stray bits of her hair behind her ear, “Okay, sure. Dancing and goofing off sounds like a  _great_  idea. Did you forget where we are?”

Hunter slows a little, glancing away from her and from the spot at the nape of her neck where a few loose gold strands gather, never long enough to reach a hairtie.

“I dunno,” he admits, the solemnity in his voice and in his chest a contrast to the words filling the dorm room, tinny from his iPhone speaker. “I try to, sometimes.”  

Casey goes quiet at that. He watches the hand holding the pencil slowly come to a halt, hovering emptily over the Chemistry worksheet, and he watches her shoulders lower with steady release as she sighs. She twists around in her chair, arm slinging over the back, blue eyes settling on him with unreadable focus. He stops dancing.

He feels like he should say something different this time, something braver.  _You’re beautiful_ , or,  _I kinda want to kiss you all over_ , or,  _I want you to know that I know that you’re human and a person and that’s okay and every superhero has a secret identity_ , but none of that comes out.

Instead, he blurts out a self-conscious, “What?”

Casey sighs through her nose, mouth tilting up on one side in thought, but then the tug turns into one of a hesitant smile, and she scoffs to try to make up for the fact that she stands up and crosses the room and grabs his wrist.

“Don’t embarrass me,” she says, and that might be the first time he doesn’t do what she tells him to.

 

*****

 

“Someone’s coming,” Casey hisses.

Hunter freezes up. His life flashes before his eyes. There is nothing even remotely interesting in it except for that roller-coaster incident. Great.

“Shit,” he announces. “Fuck. Balls.  _Shit_.”

“I have an idea,” Casey whispers rapidly, gripping his shoulders, flattening him against the wall of the tunnel that supposedly leads to a secret passageway that supposedly leads to the cave in the woods in a way that supposedly can go undetected by the Academy staff, whatever, it’s all very Marauder’s Map and apparently very important to Casey’s plan as a whole, but now there are footsteps and there’s the risk of punishment by death or waterboarding, again, and Hunter’s whole brain is a wailing siren. “But I need to know that you’re okay with it.”

“I am okay with any idea that makes us not die,” Hunter manages to wrestle out through the lump in his throat.

“It’s a classic sitcom move,” Casey assures him. “I’m talking  _Friends_  levels of cliché. Are you okay with that?”

“Yeah, sure.” Hunter claps his mouth shut and frowns dubiously. “Hey, wait,  _Friends_  was a great sh—”

Casey’s mouth tastes nothing like he’d imagined it—flavorless but for the hot breath of life, the slip of a pushing tongue, the day-old taste of toothpaste.

The footsteps belong to Ike and Jade, incidentally. So. Awkward.

Good cover, anyhow.

(“That was just for cover, right?” he asks her later, clearing his throat.

She shuffles from foot to foot, swiftly tucking some hair behind her ear and ducking her eyes.

“Right,” she answers. “Just for cover.”

“Just for cover,” Hunter repeats.

“Yeah,” Casey affirms. She sounds a little less sure that time.)

 

*****

 

These are the small things:

  1. Her nose scrunches up when she laughs, like  _really_  laughs, which he’s only seen once or twice, when he’s earned it, when there’s no one else around, and her mouth opens and her gums are pink and she doubles over and laughs with her belly, with her whole  _body_ , and that’s probably the number one reason he wants to make sure they all get out of here safely—so she’ll have more opportunities to do that, anywhere in the world, even if he isn’t there.
  2. She buttons her shirt up all the way, so that the collar halts at her jugular, and she never undoes it, so maybe she never breathes. That’d make sense. She definitely has shades of immortal warrior in her, or whatever that’d be.
  3. Sometimes she gets distracted thinking about physics problems or escape plans and she forgets to wipe her mouth after lunch, so there’ll be a smudge of mustard there, or some salad dressing, or a couple of crumbs, and he’ll think about doing that thing they do in the movies, where he reaches out and brushes it off with his thumb and locks eyes with her for a second too long, but here in the real world there are things like personal space and respecting other people’s privacy and accepting statements like, “I really think we should just be friends right now,” so he never does.
  4. She has some muscle in her arms. He sees it once by accident when he pokes his head into their room to ask Jade for the Geometry questions and Casey’s doing crunches on the floor in a sports bra and he turns red and babbles and darts away. He suspects that Jade had been behind it, some way,  _somehow_ , because Jade will be diabolical and smug in the future, so who’s to say she isn’t that way now?
  5. She brought a bottle of perfume with her that her mom and dad had given her before she’d left, for some birthday at an indeterminate time, and she only ever uses it every now and then, usually when they’re all heading straight into a situation that could very well end in their own demise, but it smells like a garden and it smells like a new hope and it smells like second chances, and they always come back alive.
  6. Maybe there’s something to be said about the way that her brow crinkles when she’s holding something back, or the way she carries some of that Burt’s Bees chapstick with her wherever she goes because chewing her lip is a nervous habit that she can’t break, or the way she avoids looking him in the eye when she has to say something that could be interpreted by the bitter as cruel, or the way she runs with arms pumping like she’s reaching for something, or the way she jogged in place one time in P.E. to wait for him to catch up during the mile, or the way it throws him to imagine that she had a life before this and she had friends and she had things to smile for and look forward to and didn’t have to worry about keeping the world safe from insidious things with her own bare hands and her own terrifying capacity for both the rawest of kindness and the most willful of violence—but then again, you know, maybe there isn’t. Maybe she’s just Casey. Maybe that’s all she’ll ever be. Maybe that’s the best conceivable option. Maybe he wants to live forever.



 

(These are the smaller things:

  1. He guffaws. Throws his head back and claps his hands and sometimes covers his mouth with a fist and shakes and sheds tears, laughing, every piece of him devoted to the expenditure of joy. It frustrates her, at first, that she can’t quite figure out how he does it, how he still has that much happiness  _left_  to so frivolously emanate, but then she starts to understand something about Hunter, something about the fact that all the good things about him are boundless, something about how maybe hope isn’t so pointless after all.
  2. She loses count of how many times in a single conversation he has with her he puts his hand on the back of his neck and rubs it or scratches it or just grips it, staring sheepishly at the floor; she thinks that maybe it means something like that he’s in love with her or doesn’t believe in himself or maybe both, but they’re kids, that’s nonsense, they can’t worry about that.
  3. He chews pencils into a pulp and his nervous habit of gnawing on erasers has bitten off at least six of them, and when he spits them out he’s always loud about it and then embarrassed when whatever unsuspecting teacher turns around mid-lecture to glare at him, and one time in class she stares at the way he holds a highlighter cap in his mouth for  _fifteen minutes_ , and never knows  _why the fuck_.
  4. A few times, he comes to morning classes with damp and tousled hair, having just gotten out of the shower; it’s a dark auburn where it curls at the nape of his neck and in front of his ears and he smells like soap and she thinks it might be the vaguer definition of the word  _nice_.
  5. Don’t mention Tim Hortons around him unless you plan on standing there and listening to him monologue to the brink of genuinely emotional tears for half an hour.
  6. _Live_ , his whole body and being says.  _Live a hundred times. Never look back. Never look where you’re going. Just go. Be._ )



 

And this is the largest:

  1. They could.
  2. ( _Not right now_.)




End file.
